Redwoods have a propensity to sing. Not in a melodic, dictated line, but in painterly, impressionist swaths. They hum as they reach for one another with outstretched roots beneath the Earth. In a crescendo, blankets of pines stretch for God. Holy rainwater spirits their growth. This concerto they embody wholly. 

I began, prior to my time with the Redwoods, as a classical musician, taking first the cello, then the violin, discovering my voice in the full-bodied, bass-heavy timbre of the cello, and what it meant to soar with the violin’s soprano. I toyed with absolutes. Neither satisfied the need to become God but—I acknowledge—perhaps I was close. 

Music is an act of creation, of divination, unlike any other I’d known. I clawed for more. I flew across the country in pursuit of classical music stardom. I abandoned the violin in an airport. I could not afford to travel with both. 

I lived in California for a stint, chasing chambré dreams of sheet music and rosin dust. A particularly rattling audition landed me on Castro Street, San Francisco. I stepped into a local cafe and purchased a croissant and latte to soothe my nerves. A mural of beige rings rippled along the far wall. It seemed familiar to me, those rings echoing back centuries to a sapling. From there sprouted rings of bark. I did not make the tree-ring connection, then—I realized how the world sang to me only later. 

I stepped outside. A flyer stapled to an electricity pole spoke of the trees—Redwoods. It was striking in a Shostakovich type of way: melancholic, afraid, but forward in its message. Save the Redwoods, it said. Defend them with your bodies, your souls, your lives. The main defense was happening in Humboldt County, five hours north, where leagues of hippies and otherwise wayward individuals found purpose. I had not anticipated the breadth of the Redwoods’ movement, how their tendrils reached across the country. I’d seen Butterfly, she was called, on the news, for her two-year tree sit at the site I was traveling to. Possibilities, it seemed at the time, fell under me eternally. Options were endless and all I had to do was reach, grasp, pull them towards me. 

The bottom of the flyer had tear-away tags. Three tags remained. I ripped off one. 

I piled my belongings into my Chevy Malibu, a backpack and a suitcase, with my cello in the front seat, and drove over the course of a few albums. I stopped in a motel and spent the night with roaches and rotten bedding. In the morning, the forest found me. 

I heard their song for the first time when I arrived in Humboldt County. It was cacophonous, how it rang around us all, then. We carried its tune, humming to ourselves in hushed tones that together formed a heavenly drone. I was christened by the forest, given the name Rabbit, and I became a pine on a leaf on a Redwood in a clear-cut zone in the Southwest.  

We wore masks of various animals and other natural iconography to protect our identities. We painted our faces when our masks broke with the pigment from berries and the paint from signage. We wrapped our bodies around the Redwoods, our flesh their shield, as company loggers spat in our faces. Our bodies were our instruments. 

“Step down,” they said. 

“We won’t,” we replied. 

“We will,” they emphasized, “call law enforcement. Step. Down.” 

We remained. Our hands interlinked as notes on a page create music, and we made our own sound. We sang as we worked, sang as we protested, sang as we fell. We were the roots of the Redwoods and we heard their language. We were forever. We were always living, always green, always masked, always one. 

The Redwoods thanked us in a broken tongue. Daily, we thanked those trees for saving our lives, providing us a new purpose. We were to usher humanity into a new world, where God was the trees and God was the Earth but that already existed and we screamed for our pious ignorance not seeing this before. We screamed because the Redwoods screamed. Listen, hear them cry in shattered bramble and barren clear-cuts. Let the Redwoods be your Savior.  

The loggers used brute force. A companion was kicked until she broke the line. From there, our protest fell apart. We grasped for one another, stretched across the bark to fill her empty place, but fingers only reach far enough to touch, not far enough to grasp. We were missing notes on empty pages as loggers spat and kicked and shouted until we broke and our harmony shattered. A logger hurled a punch at a man named Sequoia. A tooth flew from his mouth. There was fury in his eyes. A woman I barely knew threw rocks at the loggers. People would not stop screaming. Law enforcement arrived in a flurry of blue-red lights and they sided with the logging company. The Law, as its enforcers said, dictated that we must leave the tree due to trespassing. They beat us as they told us we were unwelcome.  

You are trespassing, we said. You, with your rattling chainsaws and lumbering machines, you are trespassing on natural soil. You molest the Earth for capital gain. You slaughter and steal and ruin and demolish. You are the children of a ruptured world. Thieves, pirates, vagrants parading as men of the law, of morale defined. You are the parents of destruction. You are trespassing, we cried. Hear our rapture. 

Pepper spray shocked the air with a deluge of bitter poison. The flesh lines broke down and my arms wrapped around the bark, my nails dug deep into its brittle surface and punctured the phloem layer. Sap gasped upon my beaten knuckles. The forest was teeming with a symphony of shouts, cries, screams, as activists poured water on one another and clawed at their eyes and their mouths. I latched harder upon my Redwood and listened there for the heartbeat. Thump. Thump. It beat and my heart beat with it. It was ancient and rhythmic. Thump. Thump. Cops held the pepper spray next to my face, coating my ears, pellets ricocheted into my nostrils and eyes. I bit down hard and my lip broke. My mouth was sharp and metallic. I knew only my Redwood and to it I grappled. I bled as it bled. Thump. Thump. Deliverance was coming. Thump. Thump. The world began to tremble as loggers cut into My Redwood. Their chainsaws bore holes through my ears in discordant, piercing notes. My Redwood and I clung to one another. The tree quivered and I quivered with it. Something far off crashed, a tree, perhaps. I could not see beyond the bark that grazed my eyelids.

Redwoods have always sung. I only had to listen. 

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E.B. Davis (she/her) is a queer, transgender writer from Lexington, Kentucky. She is currently pursuing a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing from Transylvania University. On the off-chance she’s not plucking away at her writing, she can be found cozied up with her short-haired gray tabby and a book. Her work can also be found in Nowhere Girl Collective.